15 Duets & 2 Solos

All of the music on this CD was improvised live in the studio, without charts, pre-planning, or overdubbing, except for #17.

“These guys rewrote the Declaration of Independence. Homegrown and sky high. To me, jazz generally speaks of big cities. Here we have a breakthrough to the language of the high mountainous deserts & sagebrush of New Mexico. Music rating: organic.” — Mark Weber

“We understand thought as the capacity to detain the movement of experience. For example, I am able to experience time elapsing. Now I try to think about time and then it is stopped. Thought does not help to comprehend movement. The clock is a machine to measure time and we can measure time because we specialize it. But rigorously speaking this is an illegitimate translation from time to space, a reference from space that alludes to time but does not explain it.” From Chats at Drummond by Silo 1974.

Unlike the intellect which must stop the flow of time in order to process experience, intuition is one with experience. Silo explains that intuition is the intelligence of the emotions. This allows for a creative interaction with the present, while remaining in the flow. As Henri Bergson states in his book, The Creative Mind, ” (Intuition) is the direct vision of the mind by the mind-nothing intervening, no refraction through the prism, one of whose facets is space and another, language. Instead of states contiguous to states, which become words in juxtaposition to words, we have here the indivisible and therefore substantial continuity of the flow of the inner life.” As a musician involved in playing completely improvised music, intuition is the connection to the process of music making. It creates a kind of intelligent empathy and simultaneous reflection that connects the members of the group to each other forming a musical whole.

Each individual is united through touch and kinesthetics to the playing of his or her instrument, with the auditory and synesthetic experience of that music on his or her body and spirit. This feedback is being constantly modified by the presence of other musicians, their music, how that music is heard and felt, their attitude towards the music and how it influences their posture and energy. In so many words, the amount of inter-related feedback loops are so astronomical within a small group that is improvising music that it would take a million words to trace what happens spontaneously when the intellect is let go of in favor of the intuition. — Kurt E. Heyl 7/20/95 – 4/14/00